Page 1 of The Scandalous Love of a Duke (The Marlow Family Secrets #6)

Katherine’s fingers grasped the pale uneven trunk of the beech tree. Laughing, she braced her body to stop her descent down the grassy slope, her fingers slipping on the thin strips of peeling bark.

She turned back to catch her friend’s hand.

In fits of giggles, Margaret fell against the tree too.

‘Shhh…’ Eleanor, Margaret’s younger cousin, whispered, her fingers pressed to her lips as she struggled to tame her own intemperate humour. ‘They will hear us.’

More giggles erupted from the large group of younger girls behind them. Eleanor was the most boisterous of them though.

Looking across her shoulder, Katherine smiled.

Katherine was the outsider here. The odd one out.

A Spencer. All the other girls were the Duke of Pembroke’s grandchildren.

Katherine was nothing compared to them. Her adopted father was a lowly squire.

But Katherine had grown up among this family.

These girls were more sisterly to her than her sister.

Her brother Phillip was John Harding’s friend and John was another of the duke’s grandchildren, the eldest, and his grandfather’s heir.

One day John would own the land they stood on, and a dozen other estates. He would be rich.

John . His name stilled Katherine’s heart and slowed her breathing as a secret longing welled inside her.

‘Can you see them?’ Caroline, one of Margaret’s younger sisters, whispered.

‘What are they doing?’ Margaret leaned forward, peering over Katherine’s shoulder.

‘Swimming!’ Eleanor managed to gasp and giggle at the same time. ‘They are naked.’

The girls about Katherine broke into fits of laughter again.

‘Hush,’ Heather, Margaret’s older sister, who was the eldest of the girls, urged them to be silent.

She was eight and ten. She had already curtsied to the Queen.

Her father was an heir to a duke too. All the other girls were the daughters of dukes or earls.

Katherine loved them all, but even so she knew she stood out.

‘We should not have followed,’ Heather said.

‘Papa will kill me.’ Eleanor laughed.

‘And Grandfather will kill John,’ Margaret whispered.

The girls looked at one another as Katherine looked about them all.

John was their pattern card. All his younger cousins followed him like shadows, emulating everything he did.

They were all in awe of him. But Katherine’s feelings were much more than just awe.

She loved John, secretly, but without hope or expectation.

When she was with him her heart ached and raced, and well… She did not know how to explain it.

Katherine’s gaze focused on the boys cavorting in the lake. They seemed oblivious to the girls obscured by the curtain of leaves.

They were splashing water at each other, shouting and baiting one another, laughing.

John, pale-skinned, lean and athletic, lunged at Katherine’s brother, gripped his shoulders and pushed him underwater.

The game grew more aggressive. Phillip thrust up and retaliated, lunging back at John, and when John dodged him, Phillip dived beneath the water and pulled him under.

All the boys, a dozen or more of John’s friends from Oxford, broke into an uproar then, as the game became a mêlée .

They were not boys though, not any more, no more than she was a girl. They were young men and she was on the brink of womanhood. She could be married now if she wished. The problem was the only person she wished to marry was unattainable. John.

‘We should go,’ Heather breathed beside her. ‘We shouldn’t be here.’

Katherine turned.

Eleanor made a mischievous face at her older cousin. ‘Killjoy.’

‘Give them their privacy,’ Heather pressed.

Eleanor pouted, she was only thirteen. ‘We didn’t know they were going to swim.’

‘And that is precisely why we should go back before we are missed.’ Heather caught hold of Eleanor’s arm. ‘Come on, they will start the celebrations soon.’

The other girls began peeling away.

Katherine would have to go back too, but she would rather be in the water. Her gaze returned to the lake. The day was hot, and the heat was heavy, clinging and oppressive.

‘Kate!’ Eleanor called, in an are-you-coming voice.

Katherine glanced back and nodded before taking an irresistible final look at the boys.

John was standing in the shallow water, near where the lake dropped over a weir into a cascade, taunting her brother.

The lake rose to the indent of muscle at his hip.

Katherine’s breath was trapped in her lungs for a moment.

He had lost the coltish look he had a few years ago when she first met him. He was physically magnificent now, over six feet tall, sinuous and muscular. She longed to touch him, and her heart beat raced like the thudding hooves of a galloping horse as warmth flooded her veins.

‘Kate!’ Eleanor called again.

John’s head turned and his intense, ice-blue eyes spun in the direction of the trees where she was hiding.

There was an aura about John, an attraction which drew everyone in.

His looks were striking and he had a presence which captured people’s attention when he was in a room.

He was born to lead people, or perhaps bred to do so.

His fingers lifted and swept his damp jet-black hair off his brow, but his gaze didn’t leave the trees.

He had an inherent grace too.

He was calm and silent in nature, though strong-willed.

He won most arguments with her brother. But he had an instinctive awareness of others, and he was always kind to her.

John acted like a brother to her. He was always considerate.

He included her even when Phillip forgot to, and John never grew tired of her dogged company as Phillip sometimes did.

At what point her feelings had changed from sisterly to something else, she could not say. Perhaps she had always felt differently about John. But now it was obsession.

His eyes seemed to find hers, though surely he could not see her. She smiled. All the girls in his family were stunningly beautiful, it carried from their mothers. In John that beauty was breathtakingly masculine. She could not take her eyes off him when she was near him.

‘John!’ her brother called.

John’s gaze ripped away, his awareness disengaging from the trees and returning to the lake.

‘Kate!’

Katherine caught her breath, dragging air into her lungs and turned back.

Eleanor and the others were at the top of the slope, waiting for her.

Katherine lifted her hand to say she was coming and began to climb.